Sunday, May 19, 2013

2012 Aurealis Awards

I had a great evening at the Aurealis Awards last night, and I have to say a big congratulations to the SpecFaction NSW team for doing a bang up job over the last three years.

The other big congratulations go to Margo Lanagan who just about scooped the awards winning best YA novel (shared with Kaz Delaney), best SF short story, best Fantasy Novel and best Fantasy short story. Way to go!

Some folks at the awards commented about how the organising committee should have done something to 'sort' out the fact that Margo won so many awards. Well, I'm not sure how that could have been 'sorted'. Firstly it's important to know that all the juding panels work independently and do not know the results of the other panels. That is entirely fair and as it should be. The second thing it's important to know is that Margo is a singular literary talent who had two extremely strong books out this year. That's why she won those awards, and deservedly so.

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SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks